Ok, so.. For a long time, I've claimed that obviously the egg came before the chicken, as the first chicken had to be hatched from something.

We had a discussion about it today at work, and Jens contested that claim. So now I've revised my position.

Chicken can lay eggs without them being fertilized. This means the eggs are made up of non-genetically-mixed material, and that the fertilization alters the contents of the eggs (the thing that gets hatched).

This means that some kind of proto-chicken got fertilized, laid a proto-chicken egg that contained a mutated offspring that we would today call a chicken.

This is a very simplified concept, because the definition of chicken has evolved as much as chickens have. Probably nobody knows what,or if our ancestors had a name for them before we found them to be finger lick'n good, that period probably lasted all but 5 minutes when the first protohuman scarfed down the fire charred remains of our first of a long history of 12 piece meals.

I think what you're calling a proto-chicken egg would be considered a chicken egg since a chicken comes out of it, or would you call it by what laid it? I guess it would be what laid it since you wouldn't realize what's inside it is a chicken, not a proto-chicken

uhm is just me or is he going against his own words, some proto-chicken laid an egg, out of that the chicken was born, which means the egg was before the chicken, but the proto-chicken before the egg.....

my opinion: egg was first as they never state chicken egg or chicken, but just chicken. Dinosaurs laid eggs which were before the chickens.